Description Jim Lewis 2003-06-24 23:31:58 EDT

I recently conducted a usability study in which new users (voice or HTML 
programmers) installed IBM's WSSD and a plugin toolkit (IBM Voice Toolkit 
4.1.1).  All users who viewed a Welcome page (either the WSSD or Voice Toolkit 
page) tried to click the bullets (with the graphic design of arrows in a blue 
circular bullet), indicating that they looked like a link button (some users 
explicitly stated this to me).  Several of the users also failed to click link 
text because the text did not have the standard appearance of a link (blue text 
with no underline rather than having an underline).  I'm in favor of creative 
graphic design, but not when the graphic design appears to mislead new users of 
a product.  On the other hand, I don't want to overstate the magnitude of the 
usability issue -- these graphic design elements did not cause any task 
failures during the testing -- just considerable user annoyance.  Please either 
change the graphic design to better match user expectation of how these types 
of elements should appear on a web page or allow the designers of Welcome pages 
to customize their pages away from this Eclipse graphic design 'standard' and 
toward more truly standard bullets and links.